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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

gisterme - 01:26am Feb 10, 2002 EST (#11408 of 11410)

rshow55 2/9/02 9:02am

"...DOD might make better decisions if they thought of options in terms of "expected rates of return."..."

Lets think about the expected rate of return for missile defense...

Several "layers" of defense are being developed to increase the odds of successfully destroying ballistic missiles after they're launched.

It's statistically not reasonable to expect 100% effectiveness from any mechanical sytstem. So odds are increased both by parallelism and sequential action. In the case of missile defense there are three phases of flight for a ballistic missile. The boost phase, midcourse phase and the re-entry phase. Because it may not be possilble to be sure of destroying all the missiles of an attack in one particular phase of the flight profile, necessarily different methods are being developed to attack such missiles in all phases of their flight. That's simply following the age-old good advice that it's unwise to put all your eggs in one basket.

If a number of missiles are launched simultaneously, it makes sense to try to knock down as many as you can during the boost phase, where debris from the destroyed missile would land fairly close to the launch site. Even though you might not knock them all down during their boost phase, every one you do get will assure that that missile won't destroy a city.

What's a large city worth? A trillion dollars? If the WTC attack had used a nuke instead of airplanes a trillion dollars in damage doesn't seem unreasonable. And what about the people in the city?

So for each missile destroyed during the boost phase the payoff is probably on the order of a trillion dollars. I don't know how much has been spent on development of boost phase MD systems like the ABL. However, if 100 billion dollars had been spent, that system would only have to knock down one missile to pay for itself a thousand times over.

Naturally you'd want to try to destroy any missiles that survived the boost phase while they were in their next phase of flight. Each missile destroyed during that midcourse phase would have a payoff on the order of a trillion dollars. That's what the current interceptor test program is about. I've heard estimates that it may cost as much as $300 billion dollars. So, how many incoming missiles would it have to destroy to pay for itself? Umm, let's see... just one. If the three out of four successful test shots to date had been the real thing, we'd have saved something like three trillion dollars already, not to mention prevention of immense human suffering.

I'm not sure just what's being done with MD systems to knock down incoming warheads in the terminal reentry phase but I think there may already exist some limited capability in that department. Whatever the cost of that capability has been, I doubt that it's anywhere close to what would be saved if it destroyed only one incoming warhead.

So in terms of "return on expenditure" development of all opportunities to destroy nuclear armed missiles is cheap compared to not destroying them. And when an effective defense is developed the likelyhood that missiles will be launched will be greatly reduced. The optimal success of expenditures on such systems would be that their existance resulted in no attack ever being launched. The best possible return on the investment is no trillion dollar cities destroyed.

All our current efforts seem like they have a pretty good prospect of an excellent return on investment.

gisterme - 01:41am Feb 10, 2002 EST (#11409 of 11410)

rshow55 2/9/02 12:11pm

"...Technically that's true -- with a beam focus that the dialog has already ruled out, and that gisterme has stopped arguing for..."

That's another one of your WHOPPERS, Robert. The focused beam is made possible by the adaptive optics. That was pointed out just yesterday. Stick to the truth!

The dialog has shown that the focused beam is possible and there's no need to argue for what is obviously possible. You're just in denial. Your entire post is an attempt at diversion from the fundamentals; but nobody's buying it, Robert. Such falsehoods make you seem corrupt. Showalter, you should try to take better care of your own credibility,...because it's nearly non-existant already.

lchic - 06:57am Feb 10, 2002 EST (#11410 of 11410)

Took out the Anthony Hopkins - NIXON video today .. interesting ...

In one scene the young were protesting about vietnam .. challenging Nixon to stop that civil war .. and he said it was perpetuated by 'the system' ..

Seems once a 'system' starts running, there are few with the talent and skills to contain it.

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